Quotes, Sayings, and Proverbs

About Albert Claude

Albert Claude was a Belgian biologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. He studied engineering, and then medicine. During the winter of 1928-29 he worked in Berlin, first at the Institut für Krebsforschung, and then at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, Dahlem. In the summer of 1929 he joined the Rockefeller Institute. While working at Rockefeller University in the 1930s and 1940s, he used the electron microscope to make images of cells which deepened the scientific understanding of cellular structure and function. He discovered the chloroplasts in the cell.
In 1930, Claude discovered the process of cell fractionation, which was groundbreaking in his time. The process consists of grinding up cells to break the membrane and release the cell's contents. Claude then filtered out the cell membranes and placed the remaining cell contents in a centrifuge to separate them according to mass. He divided the centrifuged contents into fractions, each of a specific mass, and discovered that particular fractions were responsible for particular cell functions.

For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.

For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men.

Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance.

Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.